Companies hire employees to perform the work of the company. The company has an interest in verifying that the employees are performing their work as expected. The company and the employees have an interest in evaluating the employees to properly compensate them for the work performed (e.g., giving bonuses to productive employees), or to determine areas where an employee might be more productive (e.g., perhaps the employee is in need of training).
Current work management systems are inadequate at providing the information a manager wants to be able to fairly evaluate and compensate an employee. With traditional management systems, information, if available at all, is frequently spread across different systems and/or different company records. Attempting to synthesize the information may be difficult, and there may be information that is unavailable for consideration.
One example situation of the above occurs in warehouse management. Warehouse management systems exist, but suffer the problems discussed above. Thus, for a warehouse manager to track and monitor what warehouse workers were doing during certain periods of time, the manager typically has to access many different types of documents or electronic records, which may include warehouse orders, warehouse tasks, value added service orders, quality inspection documents, inventory documents, etc. Traditionally, such documents or records are not all compatible; yet, only compatible records can traditionally be merged. The warehouse manager may not be able, due to time constraints and/or inability to access information, to fairly compare planned work to actual performance of tasks.
Another problem with traditional systems is that companies generally have what could be considered tasks related to the core business of the company, and tasks not related to the core business. Prior systems make no distinction in types of work tasks in such a manner. Traditional warehouse management systems do not even have a provision for tracking non-core tasks. Thus, traditional systems lack the ability to provide the information a manager needs to provide a fair evaluation of work performed in the company. What information might be available is distributed and not easily accessible, resulting in ineffective management, and inefficient use of time.